Data goodybag update

Exciting times indeed! I am positively giddy to kick things off today and talk a little bit (wall of text, didn’t read…) about the data goodybags that we have been working on and that everyone has been expecting for quite some time now.

The official announcement, the public unveiling and the exact release date (pssst, in about three weeks time Sorry Tom ) will be done in a nice blog post next week, but today I can already give you some of details about the goodybags themselves, what they contain and our reasoning behind them.

As a lot of you will know the idea of a data only goodybag is almost as old as when we released our first goodybags, which was… pub quiz question! And it was an idea we at first didn’t feel was right for us as this was then not a market we wanted to compete in nor did we have the technical ability to charge for data. We had enough on our plate (and still do really) with just our standard rates and goodybags as they were.

However as time moved on, we noticed the idea for a goodybag containing data only spring up again and again, which made us review our initial stance. With more and more people tethering their phones or using our SIMs in other devices, such as tablets and dongles, and us having to reluctantly take a tougher stance on this, we could see there was a need for us to create something that these people could use. Our ‘see no evil, hear no evil’ stance could no longer be maintained. Something had to be done.

However, giffgaff being giffgaff, and budgets being as tight as a gnat’s ……. we have struggled to deliver this product as development costs for these things are high and the process itself is difficult. And so each time we had a bit of budget left we continued work on it, until now we are finally ready to release it. We want to of course offer you a data goodybag at the best price we can possibly do and so I hope you will appreciate what I can reveal here. Our data only goodybags are as follows:

£5 for 500MB

£7.50 for 1GB

£12.50 for 3GB

And you can tether, use the SIM in a dongle or and iPad or any other tablet and browse or use data in any other way to your hearts content. Data goodybags last for one month (same as our normal goodybags) and should you use up all the data in your goodybag before it runs out you will then be charged at our special data goodybag rate of 2p per MB until the data goodybag expires.

And there you have it. The giffgaff data only goodybags. We’re pretty damn proud of these and here is why: All of the above goodybags are delivered to you at cost price or lower. This means that if you use every bit of data available to you in the goodybags, giffgaff will actually loose money. Pretty shocking right? So how does it work? Well, through extensive modelling, using customer data from various sources and a good dose of common sense, we know that not everyone will be using all the data in their goodybags. So in the end we believe it will eventually even out over the whole base and even bring in some profit, which will be pretty cool. You guys get the best deal we can possibly offer and we will make some profit. So together with you, we should be able to make this work quite well.

I hope you are all as pleased as we are with what we have delivered and am happy to answer any additional questions you might have. Although please bear in mind I cannot give away the wholesale price of data. I have tried to be as open and honest as I can without revealing this tit bit of information. Sorry about that

Some other additional information which might come in handy:

Yes, you need a separate SIM if you want to make use of the data only goodybags as well as our normal goodybags at the same time.

Yes, you need a separate giffgaff account for the ‘second’ SIM.

No, you can’t manage the two SIMs from one account.

Yes, you can tether with this data only goodybag

Yes, you can use a SIM with a data only goodybag in an iPad

Yes, you can use a SIM with a data only goodybag in any other tablet

Yes, you can use a SIM with a data only goodybag in any dongle

Yes, you can use a SIM with a data only goodybag in any phone

No, once you run out of data on your data only goodybag, you cannot top up with another goodybag, but will go onto our data only goodybag follow on rate. Which is charged at 2p per MB until the goodybag expires.

Yes, you will get a message from us when your data only goodybag is about to run out.

Yes, there is a grace period (an extra bit of data) of 50MB that you can use at no charge to ensure you do not accidentally use too much.

The reason we have a special 2p per MB on our data goodybags until it expires, should you use up all the data in it, is so people don’t get a massive bill shock when it runs out during a file download for example.

Re: Data goodybag update

At the moment i'm only on gg credit without any goodybag. So reading from update, i'm guessing that i can use my current SIM to buy the new data-only goodybag without needing a new SIM. Hope my understanding is correct.